My formal training is in analytical chemistry and sensory analysis but I work in any kind of technique or discipline that’s useful for making knowledge about food, flavor, and the systems that they inhabit.

Flavor is a composite sense evolved to integrate taste and smell (with input from the other senses) to give us information and pleasure from the food we eat.

Flavor is a visceral link, perhaps the most essential link, between culture, evolution, ecology, health, and biodiversity:

In the brain, flavor cross-talks extensively with emotions and memory.

On the sensory side, flavor comes from many different kinds of molecules, produced by plants, animals, and microbes as attractants, weapons, adaptations, by-products of other biologically useful molecules, and from cooking.